Study shows smartphones harm the environment

Data centres and smartphones will be the most damaging information and communications technologies to the environment by 2040, according to new research from W Booth School’s Lotfi Belkhir.

At the end of winter term in 2014, Lotfi Belkhir was approached by a
student taking his Total Sustainability and Management course who asked,
“What does software sustainability mean?”

The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Associate Professor at the W
Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology didn’t have an
answer.

Belkhir teaches students to think creatively about sustainability
tools that can be applied to their entrepreneurial ventures. But his
tools, at the time, mainly applied to hardware startups, not software.

The student’s question sparked Belkhir’s latest research on the
global emissions footprint of information and communications technology
(ICT).

Belkhir, along with Ahmed Elmeligi, a recent W Booth grad and co-founder of the startup, HiNT
(Healthcare Innovation in NeuroTechnology), studied the carbon
footprint of consumer devices such as smartphones, laptops, tablets,
desktops as well as data centres and communication networks as early as
2005. Their findings were recently published in the 2018 Journal of Cleaner Production.

Not only did they discover that software is driving the consumption
of ICT, they also found that ICT has a greater impact on emissions than
we thought and most emissions come from production and operation.

“We found that the ICT industry as a whole was growing but it was
incremental,” Belkhir explains. “Today it sits at about 1.5%. If trends
continue, ICT will account for as much as 14% for the total global
footprint by 2040, or about half of the entire transportation sector
worldwide.”

“For every text message, for every phone call, every video you upload
or download, there’s a data centre making this happen.
Telecommunications networks and data centres consume a lot of energy to
serve you and most data centres continue to be powered by electricity
generated by fossil fuels. It’s the energy consumption we don’t see.”

Among all the devices, trends suggest that by 2020, the most damaging
devices to the environment are smartphones. While smartphones consume
little energy to operate, 85% of their emissions impact comes from
production.

A smartphone’s chip and motherboard require the most amount of energy
to produce as they are made up of precious metals that are mined at a
high cost.

Smartphones also have a short life which drives further production of new models and an extraordinary amount of waste.

“Anyone can acquire a smartphone, and telecommunications companies
make it easy for people to acquire a new one every two years. We found
that by 2020 the energy consumption of a smartphone is going to be more
than that of PCs and laptops.”

Belkir has made policy recommendations based on his findings.

“Communication and data centres have to go under renewable energy
now. The good news is Google and Facebook data centres are going to run
on renewable energy. But there needs to be a policy in place so that all
data centres follow suit. Also, it’s not sustainable to have a two-year
subsidized plan for smartphones.”

With his latest research, Belkhir hopes to help students in his Total
Sustainability and Management course expand their worldview.

“When they start the course, many students don’t know what
sustainability means. When the course ends their worldview has changed
and they realize what they want to do and why they want to do it.”